This review of The Arrangement is written in question and answer
format.
The Arrangement was developed almost single-handedly by Michael B.
Clark, who also developed the game Harvest.

Q: What is The Arrangement about?

Your character is an attorney whose wife gets kidnapped on the eve
of their fifth wedding anniversary. Your goal in the game is to find
your wife. The kidnapper enjoys toying with you and has set up a
bunch of puzzles for you to solve. If you solve them, maybe he'll
let you see your wife again.

The story unfolds as you receive phone calls and emails from the
kidnapper, discover correspondence between your wife and the
kidnapper, listen to messages on peoples' answering machines, and
find other evidence of the "arrangement" the kidnapper had with your
wife. You visit several locations in the game, including virtual
worlds that the kidnapper has somehow set up for you.

Q: What are the controls like?

The Arrangement is a first person point-and-click adventure game.
There is no panning. You use the mouse to explore the screens. The
default cursor is a little white arrow. If the cursor changes to a
fat arrow, it indicates that you can move or turn in the direction
of the arrow. The cursor changes to a magnifying glass to indicate
you can zoom in on objects. A curved arrow means you can back up -
or back out of a zoom. The cursor changes to a hand to indicate you
can interact with an object in the environment - for example to push
a button. A different hand cursor indicates you can pick something
up. One click puts it in your inventory. If you've played Michael B.
Clark's previous
game, Harvest, these controls will be familiar to you.

Q: So moving around the game is fairly easy?

Most of the time. There are a few locations where it can confuse
you. Sometimes you leave a screen by clicking on sideways arrows to
turn around and then on forward arrow to move forward and exit the
location. And sometimes you leave a screen by clicking a curved
arrow to back out of the area the same way you'd back out of a zoom.
There are a few areas where there are diagonal arrows as well as
side arrows, and you may miss the diagonal arrow if you don't
explore the screen carefully with your cursor.

There is one place where you have to access three consoles.
Accessing any of the consoles other than the first one is tricky
because it can't be done using the usual horizontal arrow cursors
and there are no hotspots directly in front of the other two
consoles. Instead of using the arrow cursors, which will only rotate
you, you must search for a new type of cursor - a pointy finger -
which
will sidestep you to the next console. I spent an embarrassingly
long time trying to figure out how to access the second and third
consoles because I kept looking for hotspots in front of them.

Q: What about inventory?

You access inventory by moving your cursor over a black box that
says "Inventory" that is in the upper left corner of your screen.
This causes the inventory bar to appear at the top of the screen.
There is a magnifying glass in your inventory that you can drag over
items in inventory to examine them more closely. This is useful for
reading notes and labels on things you find.

To use an inventory item, you drag it from the inventory to the
hotspot over the object you want to use it on. Potentially
interactive locations in the game environment are indicated by a
cursor change. Using inventory is usually fairly easy, but I
remember one location in the game where the place where I had to use
the item was very close to the inventory bar and it was a little
tricky to avoid putting the item right back into the inventory.
Nothing insurmountable, but I would have appreciated the ability to
close the inventory after selecting the item.

Q: What are the puzzles like?

There are a variety of puzzles. Most of them are fairly easy as long
as you are observant and methodical in searching for inventory and
don't miss something like flipping an inventory item over to see
what's written on the back. The puzzles range from inventory puzzles
to various types of memory puzzles to color matching puzzles to
puzzles where you have to figure out a code. There was one
particularly challenging puzzle where you had to match a diagram of
a floor plan to what you saw in the game.

Q: How about saved games? Can you save wherever you like?

Yes. There are two ways to save. One is from the Menu screen you see
whenever you exit an area. The other is through the toolbar. During
the game you can right-click to make a toolbar appear at the top of
the screen and choose to Save, Load, Exit the game, or adjust
Options from there. You are allowed an unlimited number of saves.

Q: What are the Options?

You can choose to Disable Transitions or Real-time Effects through
the toolbar that appears when you right-click. On the Menu screen
there is an option for subtitles.

Q: Harvest took place in essentially only one location - an
underground complex underneath a park. Do you visit more than one
location in The Arrangement?

Yes. New locations become available as you play through the game.
They appear on the Menu screen along with Save, Load, and Exit
instead of on a separate Map screen. Locations are identified by a
small, labeled screenshot and you click on the screenshot to go
there.

Q: What are the graphics like?

The game runs in 640x480 resolution and 24-bit color. If your video
card doesn't have a setting for 24-bit color, it will work in
32-bit. The backgrounds are mostly good. Some of them are very
nicely detailed, with a nice interplay of shadows on surfaces. There
aren't many background animations other than a few areas where there
is a fire in the fireplace or candles are lit or you see city lights
blinking and stars twinkling outside a window at night. The models
for the people in the game were less satisfactory than the
backgrounds. They are somewhat stylized, and the bodies look a
little bulgy sometimes, but the main problem with them is that they
aren't animated all that well and the lip synch often doesn't match
up. At some points in the game a series of still images was used
instead of animation, and I thought this worked better.

Q: Would you say it was bad enough to detract from your enjoyment of
the game?

Not really. Most of the time you're alone in the game and don't see
any characters.

Q: How much interactivity is there in the game?

As far as character interaction, you rarely meet other characters in
the game. When you do, there are no conversation trees to contend
with. The text for your character's speech appears onscreen and
there is only one option for you to select. The person you're
talking to replies, and if your character has more to say, more text
will appear for you to click on. Sometimes a character will give you
an item for your inventory.

There is considerably more interactivity with objects in the game
world. There are drawers and cabinets you can open and machines you
can manipulate. One of the most interesting machines is the Red
Herring Checker. Put an inventory item in the machine, process it,
and the machine will destroy the item if it is not needed. If it is,
the machine will flash a sign telling you to retrieve the item.
Games like The Omega Stone could certainly have used something like
this Red Herring Checker. Also, for those who are interested in such
things, the game has some working plumbing. There are two toilets
that you can flush if you feel so inclined. Unfortunately the lids
are down so you don't get to see the water going round and round.
Maybe next game we'll get to see the water.

Q: How was the sound?

The music was very good for setting the mood of the game
environments. The music was written and recorded by Christopher
Brendel, who is currently working on his own new game, titled
Lifestream.

In general, sound effects were also good, though some of them seemed
a bit louder than they should have been with respect to one another.
Footsteps sometimes sounded like the wrong type of footstep for an
area and the sound of climbing down a ladder sounded to me more like
the sound of priming a pump. But most sounds were appropriate and
there was usually good audio feedback when you accomplished
something while working on a puzzle.

Q: Does the game have a full install option?

Yes. The game installs fully to the hard drive. You can put away
your game CD after installing.

Q: I've heard it's a short game.

Yes it's fairly short - about the same length as Harvest. But
sometimes that's just what you want when you're going to have to
leave on a trip soon and want to finish your game before you leave.
Or when you've just finished a long and difficult game and are
looking for something less taxing for a change.

There are also references to Michael B. Clark's earlier game,
Harvest. You don't have to have played Harvest to play The
Arrangement, but it's kind of fun to recognize references to the
events in Harvest when they appear.

Q: What are the required system specs for the game?

The specs as listed on the instruction sheet that came with the game
are

Sometimes when I loaded a game I'd get a message saying the script
was taking longer than expected to run, etc. etc. But the game
always loaded OK. This only happened on the slower computers.
Overall the game was very stable with some minor graphical glitches,
such as a cursor that sometimes flickered and a black rectangle that
would sometimes flicker on and off around a character's eyes. The
flickering cursor only appeared on the slow machines, but the black
rectangle also appeared with the 750 MHz computer. I wouldn't
recommend running The Arrangement on anything as slow as the 233
MHz, not because it can't be done, but because the feedback you get
while doing puzzles is delayed. Some puzzles are worse than others
this way, but it would have been very frustrating trying to solve
some of them for the first time on a sluggish machine.

Q: Where can The Arrangement be purchased?

The Arrangement is available online at
http://www.members.aol.com/arrangementgame/ You can order using
either Paypal or Kagi. The total cost is $14.95, which includes
shipping. The game arrives in a DVD case with printed instructions
and a separate soundtrack CD with about 22 minutes of music from the
game. Like Harvest and most other self-published games made by
independent developers, it is on CDR.

Q: Comments?

I enjoyed playing The Arrangement. I even enjoyed the ending, though
I'm aware that not everyone did. It's a very stable game. I don't
know of anyone who's had any serious technical problems with it.
There have been reports of occasional script errors that don't seem
to interfere with playing the game. I only had them myself when
loading a saved game on the slower computers and the save always
loaded despite the error. The Arrangement may not be the most
technologically advanced game you can buy, but there's something to
be said for a stable game that can work with any version of Windows
from Windows 95 to XP. There are no timed or action puzzles and the
story is interesting enough to make you want to keep playing. I look
forward to Michael B. Clark's next game.